Ken Dilanian

Ken Dilanian no longer works for the Los Angeles Times. He was a reporter in Washington, D.C., bureau from April 2010 until May 2014. Before that, he had spent three years at USA Today, where he covered foreign policy and Congress. He worked for a decade at the Philadelphia Inquirer, three of them as a Rome-based foreign correspondent making frequent trips to Iraq. A series he co-wrote on deaths in Philadelphia’s child welfare system won the 2007 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. A Massachusetts native, he is a 1991 graduate of Williams College.

The Egyptian military recently used American-made Apache helicopter gunships to fire rockets into houses in the Sinai Peninsula, the latest in a series of lethal raids targeting a little-known Al Qaeda-inspired group that has bombed civilians.

Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn abruptly announced his retirement Wednesday as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, after what current and former officials said were clashes with his boss and other opponents inside the Pentagon spy service.

WASHINGTON — Prompted in part by a recent video that showed Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen openly taunting the United States, the CIA launched lethal drone strikes over the last three days that marked a sharp acceleration of the Obama administration’s shadow war against the terrorist group.